Welcome!

H5Boss is an exploratory python tool for managing BOSS spectra data, SDSS-II.

Boss is originally maintained as millions of fits file in thousands of different folders. Accessing and analyzing them are inefficient in terms of I/O bandwidth and programming productivity. In h5boss, we developed functions to support:

  • Reformatting: Preserve the fits file structure and spectrum hierarchicy using HDF5
  • Subsetting: Support subset/add/update operation, to extract selected ‘plate/mjd/fiber’ and save in one HDF5 file

Currently, h5boss is implemented in both python and c version, in which the python version is actively maintained and supported. The c version is mainly for I/O sensitive users/applications.

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